Archive for the ‘Productivity’ Category

I’ve been asked several times in the past week for tips on how to be more productive. I’m going to post thoughts for comment. Hopefully they’ll help.

Asana is great for tracking tasks across a team. Rather than email tasks, use Asana and keep track of progress as well as discuss the task. You’ll cut down the email ping-pong, sleep easier knowing where people are at on tasks, and declutter your inbox.

A task is implicitly a communication but email wasn’t designed for that kind of communication. Use email as intended…

Tony’s blog is well worth following and if you haven’t read the book, I highly recommend it. I like how he focuses on labor day on how we can get more productive. These hit home in particular:

Make sufficient sleep a top priority. Schedule your bedtime, and start winding down at least 45 minutes earlier. Ninety-eight percent of all human beings need at least 7-8 hours a night to feel fully rested. Only a fraction of us get that much regularly, in part because we buy into the myth that sacrificing an hour or two of sleep a night give us an hour more of productivity.

Schedule specific times for activities in your life that you deem important but not urgent. With so much coming at you all the time, it’s easy to focus all day on whatever feels most pressing in the moment.

Live like a sprinter, not a marathoner. When you work continuously, you’re actually progressively depleting your energy reservoir as the day wears on. By making intermittent renewal and refuelingimportant, you’re regularly replenishing your reservoir, so you’re not only able to fully engage at intervals along the way, but also to maintain high energy much further into the day. (I think lots of people uknowingly do this… reading blogs, sites, feeds, twittering… we seek retreat in the river of digital content around us)